


As Sisters Do

by Margo_Kim



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Background Warden/Alistair, Dwarf Commoner Origin, Friendship, Gen, Orzammar, Sister-Sister Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 13:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7270591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natia’s sister Rica was a common enough looking woman that Morrigan had to assume that she had some hidden superlative to claw her way up into the arms of a prince. Though perhaps her hidden skill was nothing but her womb, for Natia had smiled one of her rare smiles not upon seeing her sister but hearing that her sister had born the prince a son. The son meant that Natia had not abandoned her sister to continued poverty and strife; Natia had abandoned her sister, but her sister had risen, and in rising rose the guilt from Natia’s back that had stooped the dwarf for as long as Morrigan had known her. And so a womb was ever and always the world’s most precious bargaining chip.</p><p>Morrigan did hate it when her mother was right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Sisters Do

Natia’s sister Rica was a common enough looking woman that Morrigan had to assume that she had some hidden superlative to claw her way up into the arms of a prince. Though perhaps her hidden skill was nothing but her womb, for Natia had smiled one of her rare smiles not upon seeing her sister but hearing that her sister had born the prince a son. The son meant that Natia had not abandoned her sister to continued poverty and strife; Natia had abandoned her sister, but her sister had risen, and in rising rose the guilt from Natia’s back that had stooped the dwarf for as long as Morrigan had known her. And so a womb was ever and always the world’s most precious commodity and bargaining chip.

Morrigan did hate it when her mother was right.

“He looks like you,” said Rica of the babe who looked like nothing but a babe, which is to say poorly formed clay half-baked in a shoddy mold. “You used to sleep just like this.”

Natia held her nephew in her arms and said, “Sister, I think all babies sleep like this.”

“And you would know,” Rica said. “What with all the babies you have cared for.”

The sisters laughed, as sisters often did, with identical rhythm, cadence, and tone. One laugh in two mouths. Morrigan, who made no habit of thinking on the Witches of the Wild, thought on them now. She wondered if she laughed like them. Perhaps. More likely than not. Morrigan, after all, laughed like Flemeth.

She looked into the fire. The sister lay together in a lounge in the receiving half of Rica’s chambers. When Rica had welcomed Natia and her companions to her chambers some hours ago, she had greeted them all and then, with a lady’s genteel grace, ignored everyone who was not her sister. Natia and Rica drank in each other’s company, and the rest of the group, with chuckling forbearance for the family reunion, split off to the side chambers to enjoy their dinner, the fire, a comfortable place to sit before bed. As the hours of the evening passed, they peeled off to sleep or the city’s nightlife or to snoop around the palace of the dwarf Natia had decided to throw her weight behind for the sake of her sister. Alistair had lingered the longest, sitting on the edge of Rica’s new finery and staring into the fire that Morrigan now stoked. He’d wanted to speak with Natia alone, that was easily clear, but he’d given up, as he always did, and retired himself to no doubt a fitful night spent enduring some tedious emotion.

Twas late now, as far as Morrigan could tell in this city-sized tomb, and Morrigan alone of Natia’s companions still lingered in Rica’s rooms. Why she herself did not retire, she could not say. Certainly she should have left before Rica brought the babe out, for now, in the way of a new mother’s ruthless hostage taking, there would be no leaving until Natia had cooed properly. Natia was doing as well as she could, offering a tersely murmured appreciation of the child whenever he shifted. Rica, it should be mentioned, had not presented the babe to Morrigan. Somehow, mothers never did. Old fears, perhaps, of witches and firstborns.

A knock came at the door. None of the women stood as a dwarf came in clad in a tunic that marked him as someone important to someone important. One of the prince’s men, Morrigan judged, from the way he bowed to the prince’s childbearer and the prince’s champion. “My lady,” he said to Rica. “My lord requests your presence.”

“My—oh!” Rica said as if remembering something. She looked at her sister with an apology in her eyes. “I’ll return as soon as I can.”

Natia held out her arms. “Take your time and care. I have to make the acquaintance of my nephew.”

Rica handed over her child, settled the babe in the rough arms of her sister, and smiled at the tableau. “You look good with him, little sister. Maybe someday you might—”

“The prince, Rica,” Natia said.

An elegantly done dismissal. As fine as any lady’s.

The sister left, and took the messenger with her. Natia sat on the lounge with child in arm, staring down at his face with a more critical eye than the one she’d cast over him while his mother lay beside her. Morrigan from her place in the shadows watched the child herself. She had seen many babes in her time. She had delivered some, performed very different deeds with others, all as she wandered the land at the very end of her mother’s leash. It was a cord that bound all the together for Morrigan’s long delusion that it was not there at all, an umbilical chain Flemeth had wrapped around Morrigan’s neck. She did hope Natia would get to killing the old woman sooner rather than later. It was a far better use of her time than staring moonstruck at a child too fat for his own good on the milk of royalty.

“Do you know what he would have been if he were born a woman?” Natia asked. Her voice was pitched no louder that it had been when she spoke to her sister not six inches away from her, and yet the voice was aimed with perfect clarity at Morrigan. The babe gurgled and Natia bounced him gently.

“Like her mother, I imagine,” Morrigan said. “Tis that not the way the story goes?”

“A whore or a muscle,” Natia replied. “One sister went one way, one the other, paths picked for us by men who weighed our measure before we were grown. And here we are now.” Natia’s mouth twisted, in something like a smile. “Both sleeping in the company of princes tonight.”

Morrigan rolled her eyes in disgust as she stepped forward towards Natia. “You still persist with him then?”

“Did you forget? I know not how, for you have never let me.”

“You seemed so very determined to keep him from your side tonight.” Morrigan shrugged. “I thought by all luck you had come to your senses.”

Natia’s eyes dropped, looking down at something lower than the babe in her arms, who reached up for her face with arms that seemed ill-proportioned for a human frame. “No,” she said in a tone Morrigan couldn’t trust. “Would you like to hold him?”

“Whether you mean Alistair or the babe,” Morrigan replied, “the answer is the same.” Morrigan came forward still more. She did not sit where Rica had sat. She did not sit at all. She stood, crossed her arms, and looked askance; the Warden was not her sister, and Morrigan would be no sister to her. “Was it your mother who set you in such a strange mood as you are tonight?”

Natia almost smiled. “Now who is full of questions tonight?”

“Tis revenge. You have dug so relentlessly into the wounds of your companion’s pasts that surely you are owed a return of the favor.”

“I have offered my ear with gentle patience. You make me sound so sinister.”

“You are sinister—a burrowing creature who digs into hearts rather than flesh. And you have not answered my question.”

“Your question of if I am in an odd mood because my drunk mother called me a worthless whore in front of my friends?” Natia said. “No, the event left no impact at all. She has done it so often that I was if anything nostalgic for it.”

“Good,” said Morrigan. “For I feared saw something darker in your eyes when she spoke. In truth, I worried that every step of this miserable journey through this pit of a city would be nothing but you being spat on and swallowing the spit with that sad little look on your face. I would feel obliged to offer you comfort, I suppose.”

Natia laughed, a bark that the babe in her arms giggled at. “No need to fear, my sweet Lady Disdain. No emotions here, save for those that are convenient for you.”

“I fine boon indeed.” Morrigan looked away from Natia’s face. There was a strange heaviness in her throat. “I’ll allow you some measure of wrath, if you like. I might endure that from you.”

After a moment, Natia asked, “Oh?”

“Indeed. Tis no less than what I would feel were I you returned here to spit and jeers. That you have restrained yourself thus far betrays a weakness that hardly becomes a Warden.”

“My much maligned good heart still giving you no end of grief? My refusal to slaughter the city bringing you discomfort?”

“If you are to pride yourself quite so highly on your supposed goodness, you could at least expend it on those worthy of it,” Morrigan said with a vehemence that surprised her. From the look on Natia’s face, the joking gleam in her eye swept away by Morrigan’s quiet rage, it surprised Natia as well. “This city deserves nothing of your care. If we didn’t need its armies, I would tell you to let them seal themselves in. May they entomb themselves in the earth to rot.”

Natia said nothing, and in the silence embarrassment rushed up to fill Morrigan with a heat far more unpleasant than that of rage. The babe gurgled the beginning of a cry, and the women looked down at him suddenly, as if they had forgotten he was there. Natia began to bounce him on her knee and then, when the gurgling intensified, stopped. “Except for my sister, of course,” Natia said wryly, and gave Morrigan a small smile—half a quirk from half a lip—that swept away discomfort like spider webs.

Morrigan offered her own small smile in response, one she feared stretched wider and revealed more than the Warden’s ever did. “Very well,” Morrigan said. Your sister and her whelp. I permit you their lives spared from your allotted wrath.”

“So long as you approve.”

“I would help. Leave Rica and—” Morrigan pointed to the babe, who belched a hiccupping cry that neither women knew what to do with, “that one to my care, and you could raze the city yourself.”

“A generous gift.”

“You promised to kill my mother for me,” said Morrigan. “Tis only well I bind you to the promise by handling your kin first.”

“I will kill her before she kills you,” Natia said with a matter-of-factness that did more to warm Morrigan’s heart than a thousand sweet nothings ever could. “You need do nothing to ensure that I will.”

Morrigan waved the sentiment off. “You will expect repayment. This I know.”

“Do you?” Natia’s eyes were steady upon her. “I know enough of mothers who suck the lives from their daughters to survive. I will rid you of yours, Morrigan. That is a Warden’s promise.”

Morrigan said nothing to that. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t be as tediously emotional as whatever love poetry Alistair hid in his bedrolls or as Leliana’s sermons by the fire. Telling Natia that her mother’s cruelty had strengthened her would only anger Natia, as would the equally true statement that the sisters should have been content to let their mother die in the gutters years ago, as she no doubt would have done without their support. Morrigan did not pity Natia her past, nor did she wish she could have spared her it. And Morrigan was constitutionally incapable of patting a cheek and murmuring _there, there_. Morrigan did not believe she had ever murmured a day in her life.

So instead, all Morrigan said was, “Do deal with Alistair at some point. As the prince your mother accused you of whoring with, he’s been sulking about it all evening.”

Natia groaned, though Morrigan could only hope it was in annoyance at the boy rather than sympathy. The babe groaned as well, though his was clearly not in sympathy at all; the little monster took the moment to elbow forth onto the scene, the hiccups of his groan bursting forth into true sobs. Morrigan grimaced and raised her hand. Then the babe was silent again.

“Please do not use your magic on my nephew to make him sleep,” Natia said in a tone that suggested she perhaps didn’t too deeply mind.

“I’m hardly giving him nightmares.”

“Somehow I doubt the royal nanny will approve. Or my sister.”

“Best not to tell them.”

The babe snored, as babes do, and Natia shifted on the lounge. She patted the space beside her. Morrigan, for some reason, came and sat. Even sitting down, she loomed over Natia, who hunched over her nephew, her ear pressed down near his face and her eyes closed as she listened to him sleep. “He doesn’t really look me, does he?” Natia asked, worried.

“You are far prettier. And less likely to soil yourself.”

“What a good friend you are. You say such kind things.”

When Natia offered Morrigan the babe again, Morrigan took him, her head on the delicate slope of his soft skull, his face slack with Morrigan’s sleep. He was beautiful, Morrigan supposed, in the way delicate things were when you realized how simple it would be to break them.

Natia tipped her head sideways onto Morrigan’s shoulder. Morrigan managed to bear the weight.  

 

**Author's Note:**

> Watch me scream about how much I love all my children as I play my way through Dragon Age over at [my tumblr](http://margotkim.tumblr.com/)


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